


Impossible Soul

by silloh



Category: Minecraft (Video Game), Video Blogging RPF
Genre: Bittersweet, Character Development, Flashbacks, Gen, Ghosts, Grief/Mourning, Hurt/Comfort, Technoblade Needs a Hug (Video Blogging RPF), Technoblade-centric (Video Blogging RPF), Twins Wilbur Soot & Technoblade, Unreliable Narrator, Wilbur Soot and Technoblade are Siblings, i just really love imagery, this is like 90 percent imagery
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-24
Updated: 2021-01-24
Packaged: 2021-03-16 20:28:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,569
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28962462
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/silloh/pseuds/silloh
Summary: Wilbur's hair and skin were muted imitations of their original hues, but the visage before him wasn't the grayed out, decaying face of a corpse: It was lifelike, flawless; an impossibly perfect porcelain re-creation down to the skin of his cheeks and nose being slightly darker as if flushed from the cold. When he realized Wilbur's hands were on his face, he realized his fingers weren't spectral wisps of cold air phasing through, but instead solid and clammy, fingertips still rough from guitar string callouses.Estranged twins learn how the world works. Alternatively: Technoblade meets Ghostbur in retirement.
Relationships: Wilbur Soot & Technoblade
Comments: 11
Kudos: 97





	Impossible Soul

**Author's Note:**

> the first half of all these chapters are separate - they're mostly meant to read as flashbacks. just letting you know bc this first one's a little weird.

When Techno and Wilbur saw each other as adults, it was in passing, and it was almost amiable. And that should had been a relief - a victory even, that their relationship had reached the point of amicability - but instead, it was infuriating. Because Techno knew his brother, and he knew that the friendliness he perceived was nothing more than Wilbur's trademark denial.

They fought in tournaments against each other. They won them together. They shared a world, even; Earth, albeit on near opposite sides of the realm. They called about the shit Tommy got into and they had mutual friends and they returned to the server they'd grown up on when Phil wanted to have dinner. And Wilbur would laugh and smile and sing and if Techno were anyone else, he wouldn't notice the distance; the superficiality of that pleasant facade, no - he'd think himself lucky to have a brother so averse to grudges, or perhaps, merely, so forgetful.

But it wasn't amicability, and it wasn't forgiveness. It was Wilbur refusing to dwell for a moment on how or why their relationship fell apart - and if Techno had to wager a guess, he'd say he hadn't dwelled on it for longer than a minute in the last five years. It was Wilbur believing that if he could simply act like they were the siblings they used to be, pretense would made it true. At the same time, it was Wilbur pretending they had never been twins, because he believed that would hurt less than being twins that were no longer close.

It was Wilbur's classic denial; not an aversion to conflict, but to change, and an inability to reconcile how they grew up with his ideas on how things should have stayed the same.

L'manberg was always brisk. Even when the heat of the sun could be felt on your skin, it was a weak reassurance against the bite of bitter wind; a candle's feeble attempt to pierce the northern chill. However, even that perpetual bitterness in the air had nothing on where Techno built his home.

The walls were sturdy, two layers of planks and logs wide and insulated with vermiculite. Even then, and even under the heavy, fur mantle Techno now never removed from his shoulders, the cold snuck in through crevices in the wood and radiated up from the floor. When he coughed, the air was daggers in his lungs.

It was a bitter cold, and a bitter little house borne of betrayal and abandonment and nostalgia. But it was cozy, and when he sat nearly on top of the constantly lit fireplace, it was almost warm.

That was where he sat waiting for the tea kettle to whistle. He'd internally dubbed it his sofa, the haphazard pile of furs and leather by the fire. He looked out the window. From his angle on the floor, he could see only sky.

Sometimes there was nothing to do. He didn't like those times. Sometimes, inactivity stung worse than a knife between the ribs - but sometimes, still, it was inexplicably nice. It was too late to go mining, too early to check on the turtles. Phil was off on some sort of meandering journey - it seemed even settling on an active, war-ridden server couldn't quell his wanderer's soul - and there was no one else within a good fifty miles radius (besides Edward, but Edward wasn't a particularly engaging companion.) He could shovel snow off the patio, but he'd already spent all day outside and had reached the point of chilled-to-the-bone numbness where he felt he might keel over if he left his nest of blankets. So he just watched out the window as the sky faded into a deep blue dusk.

Phil had been odd lately. Well, odd in that he wasn't as odd as he should be. Techno imagined his son's death should warrant more than a slightly paler complexion, a slightly hoarser voice, and more unkempt hair. Certainly, Phil was aware of and devastated by Wilbur's death - he'd been so inconsolable, so lifeless, that Techno couldn't bear to be around him the first few days, shit son as he was - yet now, as Phil began recounting a series of what sounded to Techno like ongoing hallucinations, it seemed his spirit had begun to return.

Mentally manifesting his dead kid as a ghost wasn't a healthy way to cope with grief, Techno reckoned. But he had no room to talk, and seeing his father with some veneer of superficial happiness was drastically preferable to the days of sporadic sobbing or blank, empty stares, no matter how temporary the illusion may be. Techno didn't bring it up.

The tea kettle whistled. Techno disheveled the pile of furs by the hearth in his rush to stop the piercing noise.

He poured himself a cup. He only owned two, but Phil wasn't one for tea (though he apparently had an endless supply of lavender, given how his cabinets always remained stocked) so the second cup went untouched. It had probably gotten dusty. He closed the cabinet. For some reason that teacup, identical to the one he was letting burn his hands, perturbed him.

He had meant to grab a book, but forgot, and once he was back by the fireplace, nothing short of an army at his door could convince him to stand back up.

When Techno awoke, it was to tepid tea he'd fallen asleep still holding, and more notably, a knock on his door. He hadn't the precision tools necessary to whittle a peephole, and Phil hadn't gotten around to it, so he unsheathed the sword on his belt, dragging it lazily behind him as he trudged toward and opened the door, fearless despite his still dream-addled mind and the sleep in the corners of his eyes.

Wind carded through Wilbur's curls, washed out and gray to match the monochromatic world outside. Frost adorned his sweater, his skin, his eyelashes.

"Can I come in?" He asked, and his voice was thready.

Technoblade took a step back. Wilbur stepped forward, perceiving invitation, and Technoblade slammed the door. He pressed his back up against it, his eyes wide, his sword braced on the floor the only thing holding him upright. He gasped for the breath he'd lost at the sight, and his exhales came in puffs of clouded air even inside his house.

The ghost found his way in anyway. _As they so often do,_ said the part of his mind that wasn't concerned with clinging to sanity.

He was saying something, but Techno didn't hear it. He instead stared steadfastly down at the floorboards beneath his shaking legs. Belatedly, he realized that he forgot to grab his mask - aside from the bangs hanging in his face and blocking his view of the ghost, he was completely vulnerable, his expression bare to the world. He chastised himself for the uncharacteristic forgetfulness - it could've been anyone at the door - but his mask wasn't exactly the type of thing he forgot for no reason. Perhaps the knock itself had rung with a musicality that betrayed the identity of the visitor to Techno's subconscious, he pondered vacantly.

Wilbur's voice was apologizing for something. still fixedly watching the floor, Technoblade wondered how it was that he could face down armies of hundreds - or at least a couple dozen if standing alone - without a moment of doubt or fear, but the sight of his own twin's face left him reeling like he'd been shot.

When Techno spoke, the words came unbidden and quiet. Perhaps the broken, frayed edge to his voice would be imperceptible were he before anyone but the man facing him. But as it were, the command surely didn't comes across as anything but the plea it was.

"You have to leave."

Somehow, Techno knew Wilbur's answer before he said it:

"I don't think I can."

Either Techno had, at some point in his quiet grieving, snapped and descended into madness, or he needed to re-define what insanity meant. Because he didn't feel any less sane, but it seemed that was the only explanation. For the next week, he went about his retired life as per usual - mining, forging, farming, reading - but with a near constant voice at his side. His left side, too - Wilbur typically stood to his left; some nonsensical habit. It made sense that an illusionary figment would exist to fill the glaring absence in his life, but the perfection with which it did so was disturbing.

After his initial display of excellent hospitality, he didn't offer another word. If that bothered the ghost, Techno didn't look at him to find out. He supposed it must not have bothered him too much, though, because he lingered.

Occasionally, the ghost tried to interact with Techno. He'd ask to pet his horses, or for a cup of tea. When Techno didn't respond, or react in any way, he sometimes saw the ghost nod in his peripheral vision as if accepting silence as an answer. Most of the time, though, the ghost was content to talk and laugh to himself in wandering streams of conscious, or sometimes just hum. Never singing; just humming. He meandered about his home and yard, but since arriving, never strayed far.

A couple days in, Techno noticed changes in his surroundings. He found books he'd left dog-eared instead bookmarked and neatly closed on the hearth, he found silverware out of place, and once or twice, he found the dishes cleaned and put away or his bed made. It was quite plausible - more likely than not - that Techno did those things himself on off-days; those days when the monotony of a fairly objective-less life led him to zone out for hours, watching himself perform menial tasks as if from behind. He'd always had those days, but they'd gotten far more common as of late, and he was no stranger to forgetting pointless things and finding his house and life rearranged in ways he couldn't clearly recall. But, with another entity appearing to be in the house, the thought lingered in the back of his mind that they weren't his doing. But Wilbur was dead. And at times, when Techno tuned into the ghost's rambling to hear innocent tales and contemplations more similar to those of a child than of Wilbur, the resemblance was so crude it was insulting. Wilbur was dead, and the ghost in his life was a lie to himself he didn't care to encourage. Even when the changes couldn't be rationally explained - when he passed out at the dining table and woke up with a blanket over his shoulders - Techno simply returned the blanket to the pile and left to check on the turtles. Wilbur was dead. The ghost was incorporeal.

One evening at sunset, Techno stayed out too long mining. He'd gotten lost in the repetitive motions and found himself again detached, ignoring hunger, weariness, and the bursting blisters on his hands. He only came back to himself after finding a seventh cluster of diamonds, and the thought of what armor he should make required enough thought that he lurched back into his neglected body. He put the pickaxe slowly back into a loop of his belt, noticing the crusted blood on the handle. Then he turned to walk back past hours upon hours worth of mining.

The mines were cold, and he didn't know how long he'd been down there, but when he surfaced, it was still sunset. While trudging through the snow, he noticed that his legs were numb beyond the point of shaking. When he rubbed his hands together to warm them up, he found he couldn't feel either one.

Facing his closed door, he realized he would need guesswork to so much as close his fingers around the knob, much less fit the key into the lock, his sense of proprioception absent as it currently was.

The ghost came to his rescue, though, opening the door from the inside. Techno looked down before he could see the expression on its face and stepped inside.

His balance was off when he wandered toward the hearth, like walking on two sleeping legs. When he got there, he didn't manage to sit - he instead collapsed and shoved his hands as close to the fire as he could without burning them.

He absently, soundlessly watched Wilbur close the door behind him, frantically try to figure out the teakettle, then abandon it to grab blankets off the floor and out of closets. Somehow, he found none of this noteworthy.

Sensation only began to return when he saw his hands start to shake. Then, all at once, he felt like _shit._ His skin was so cold it burnt, his hair was greasy on his forehead, he was sticky with sweat, his lungs, with a quietly terrifying reluctance, don't seem to want to inhale, and all this he noticed while fighting bone-deep chills that racked his body with violent shudders. But it was only when he felt a hand on his own, forcing him to hold an _agonizingly_ hot teacup, that he fully returned to reality.

He looked at the hands cupping his own, then up. And he couldn't even be mad at himself for the week of intentional obtusity, of denial and avoidance, because seeing Wilbur's face was somehow that much worse the second time around. Every ache and pain - the muscles in his forearms were screaming, the soles of his feet were so sore he was positive there was blood in his shoes, he was pretty sure his gauntlets were physically frozen to the skin of his wrists - all of it disappeared as suddenly as it came, because that face hurt so, so much worse.

His hair and skin were muted imitations of their original hues, but the visage before him wasn't the grayed out, decaying face of a corpse: It was lifelike, flawless; an impossibly perfect porcelain re-creation down to the skin of his cheeks and nose being slightly darker as if flushed from the cold. When he realized Wilbur's hands were on his face, he realized his fingers weren't spectral wisps of cold air phasing through, but instead solid and clammy, fingertips still rough from guitar string callouses. Techno's ears rang.

Possessed by a sudden impulse and an ardence he didn't know his frostbitten hands could manage, Techno grabbed Wilbur by the shoulders and tugged him to his chest. As he fell, Wilbur frantically yanked the full teacup back out of Techno's grasp and to the side, trying not to spill it over them, but it poured out and across the floor anyway; seeped into the wooden floorboards.

For the first time since his death, Techno was fully willing - in fact, desperate - to listen to what Wilbur said, to absorb every word of it. But he didn't speak. Instead, after only a fleeting second of shocked hesitation, he grabbed Techno back and clung to him with equal fervence.

And so they sat, Wilbur collapsed against Techno's lap, curled up against the hearth and piles of woolly blankets, clinging desperately, lavender tea steaming from where it had begun to stain the floor. Techno ran shaking hands over his sweater and neck and through his hair and Wilbur dug his fingers into the fabric of Techno's mantle as if by holding him tightly enough, he could quell the feverish trembles still racking his brother's hypothermic body.

**Author's Note:**

> welcome :]
> 
> this thing is fully planned out; i know where we're going and how we're gonna get there, i just don't know how long it's gonna take bc i am ridiculously busy and should not have spent so much time working on this oh my god. so, that said: if you're looking for an action story, this may not be the one for you (you are more than welcome though, ofc) - we are in it for the character arcs, the imagery, the symbolism, the Emotional Catharsis, if you will. if you're into that thanks for coming by, hope you stick around :D
> 
> in case it wasn't clear, techno was mining, underground, in the freezing cold, for about 24 hours. seems like a good coping mechanism to me idk
> 
> god i just fucking love imagery


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